Limit Orders and Knightian Uncertainty

Abstract

A range of empirical puzzles in finance has been explained as a consequence of traders being averse to ambiguity. Ambiguity averse traders can behave in financial portfolio problems in ways that cannot be rationalized as maximizing subjective expected utility. However, this paper shows that when traders have access to limit orders, all investment behavior of an ambiguity-averse decision-maker is observationally equivalent to the behavior of a subjective expected utility maximizer with the same risk preferences; ambiguity aversion has no additional explanatory power.